Dina Lohan Speaks: Back to Reality!

Lindsay Lohan’s mother, Dina, was partying Tuesday night at the Tropicana Zone in Times Square.

“I’m doing a reality show; if you asked me two years ago, I’d be like, ‘You guys are smoking crack! I’m not doing this!’ But now I realize that I have no choice. I have to fix it for my little kids, and I have to fix my life,” she explained, while two ambiguous video-camera crews, complete with blinding lights, swirled around Ms. Lohan, 45, and her touchy twenty-something male friend, who was smiling behind strangely-appropriate dark sunglasses. “And if you believe me, believe me. But if you don’t”—she showed the Daily Transom her middle finger—“go whatever! I really think it’s time that people need to be people and, really, you can’t depend on agents and I don’t know…”

It may come as little surprise that Ms. Lohan means to approach the media cautiously. After all, her shutter-magnet daughter, Lindsay, 21, is hardly in want of bad press since her recent release from a Utah rehab facility, where the actress was sent last summer after she was pulled over in Santa Monica, drunk behind the wheel and in possession of cocaine. The details of that particular nightmare, of course, were echoed almost exactly a mere month before her second arrest, when she slammed her Mercedes into a curb.

“I think media likes controversy, and if that’s where it’s gonna go, it’s gonna go,” she said, letting her head fall at a disconcerting angle. “I don’t distrust [the media], but years ago, studios like the Warners would represent the actors in the world,” she drew closer to the Daily Transom, “You know when Marilyn Monroe had a movie or something, the studios would protect them, and they’ve lost that. Now, it’s like you’re a fish floundering out of water and I really think this tabloid bullshit—pardon my French!—will go away and reality will cave into having a neonatal heart surgeon on, like, US Weekly, God willing—to save lives. I don’t know where it’s going, but I think it’s all a bunch of crap, and I think it will change,” added Ms. Lohan, who was wearing a Dolce and Gabana jacket over a cream-colored knit top and jeans (“I don’t wear dresses!” she hollered at one point.)

The ire Ms. Lohan directs at tabloids and gossip weeklies is apparently also doled out to more highbrow publications. Asked about Judith Newman’s article, “Moms Gone Wild,” in the November issue of Vanity Fair—in which Ms. Lohan is described as not appearing “to have a close personal relationship with reality”—she scoffed. “That was so stupid!” she said of the biting feature. “They didn’t even really ask the moms; they didn’t even really get into our world. And I respect Vanity Fair, but they chickened-out. I was like, ‘I’ll do it!’”—Apparently, Ms. Lohan wanted a more in-depth profile than Mr. Carter or the author were willing to grant—“And they were like, ‘Oh, no!’ You know what, if you write an article, you come to me! You live in my house; you live in my world; you deal with it! They chickened-out! They didn’t want to do that. So whatever they say is bullshit, and they’re gonna placate whatever they’re gonna placate, you know? Sucks for them!”

“I don’t even care about my reality show”—her E! reality series, as Page Six reported last June, is tentatively called Mom-ager—“It’s just about showing the truth, and telling the world, ‘We’ll beat this crap they’re saying and they’re talking!’ Because there’s so much inconsistencies.”

Luckily, though, all is not lost. Ms. Lohan promised that her daughter is doing swimmingly in Tinseltown. Having just moved out of her conspicuous West Hollywood condo (where her neighbors included Cher, Elton John and Joan Collins), and into the Beverly Hills Hotel, little Ms. Lohan is, as her mother put it, “amazing! She’s such a normal girl. Stupid! [She] got behind the wheel, got a D.U.I., stupid! But Lindsay’s not, like, they blew it out of complete proportion. [She] had to go to three rehabs! Like, if you’re in college and you get a D.U.I., you don’t go to rehab. It’s just ridiculous!”